Candidates critical
of recent management of the Los Angeles County Bar Association and aligned with
the recently formed Council of Sections won the bar’s annual elections by huge
margins, final results released Friday showed.

LACBA
identified the winning candidates last Monday, but had not previously disclosed
vote totals. The numbers show that the self-identified reformers won the
contested races by margins of more than 2 to 1.

For
president-elect, Michael Meyer, a real estate attorney who chairs the Los
Angeles offices of DLA Piper, defeated Michael K. Lindsey, a corporate and
transactional lawyer at Steinbrecher & Span and the incumbent senior vice
president, by a final tally of 1,273 to 448. There were 145 blank ballots and
13 write-ins.

Lindsey
was the choice of the association’s Nominating Committee, while Meyer was
nominated by petition.

Meyer
becomes LACBA’s second-in-command on July 1—the current president-elect,
Margaret Stevens, becomes president on that date—and automatically moves up to
the presidency a year later.

In
the contest to succeed Lindsey as senior vice president, Philip H. Lam,
intellectual property counsel to Los Angeles City Attorney Michael Feuer,
defeated David K. Reinert, a deputy district attorney and the current vice
president. Lam received 1,284 votes to Reinert’s 436, with 151 blanks and eight
write-ins.

Tamila
Jensen, a sole practitioner and former San Fernando Valley Bar Association
president defeated Annaluisa Padilla, an immigration attorney, for the post now
held by Reinert. Jensen gained 1,180 votes to 535 for Padilla, with 158 blanks
and six write-ins.

Stevens
said in a statement:

“The
current trustees and I are happy to welcome the incoming class to LACBA
leadership. We have engaged in a vigorous debate these last several months, and
now it is time to work together to address the challenges facing our
association. All of us extend our thanks to Mike Lindsey and Dave Reinert
who have served a number of years as trustees and officers, devoting hundreds
of volunteer hours to LACBA.”

Members
elected council-backed candidates Bradley Pauley, chairman of the Appellate
Courts Section, and Ronald Brot, who chairs the Family Law Section, as at-large
trustees. Also elected was litigator Diana K. Rodgers, who was a Nominating
Committee choice.

Defeated
were James “Jim” P. Clark and Miguel Tomas Espinoza.

Elected
to represent sections were John F. Hartigan and Marc L. Sallus—both of whom
were Nominating Committee choices also endorsed by the council—and William L.
Winslow. Nominating Committee choice Roxanne Wilson was defeated.

The
council did not have a full complement of candidates in the last two categories
because one of its candidates withdrew and another was disqualified for not meeting
eligibility requirements. The council-backed candidates outpolled the
Nominating Committee choices in those races by significant margins, suggesting
that many members gave up their right to vote for three candidates in each
category and backed only the council-endorsed contenders, or wrote in the name
of a third choice.